LIFTING TIMES

LIFTING TIMES
From Brooklyn to Manhattan and from Manhattan to Brooklyn as mundane as it can get. Its been 4 months in this country, I simply can’t love it. Although I have forced my selves to romance the most talked about city in the face of this earth- New York. All I do is commute from house to work, count some green bucks, drink some Irish scotch, smoke some Cuban cigars and pretend to be happy. Nothing can come close to being at home in your country. Being with your family, having friends by your side. Roam the city streets you know like the back of your hands, where people spit wherever they like, blow horns like there is some competition going on and sweat like animals. Boy! even the dirt of my country is more sacrosanct to me than any gold of this world.
I am working as a Software Architect in a software firm. All day I plant bugs in the software and ask others to fix them. In the end when the novices fail I fix the problem as if I were a genius. There are only two kinds of people in this world one who fool others and others who get fooled. I am the former. Apart from architecting bugs , I am not doing anything else in here. I am just waiting to be deported back to my country.
It was just another day when the sun rose. I caught a train to Manhattan, bought a hot dog in the Corner House , ate it as I walked till the entrance of my company. It was 9.30 AM on a Thursday morning. I took the lift to reach my office stationed at the 67th floor .The lift moves at around 20 ft/sec. It baffles me that how anybody can travel so fast in a small compartment that suffocates and scares the hell out of people, A beautiful invention is this LIFT. It moves up and down ,stops and starts at the press of a very senile looking button, people get on it and get off it wherever they want to. I had never imagined the same very lift would take me back.
When the lift reached the 38th floor everyone got off, but for one pretty women, whom I never bothered to look. The lift started, as soon as it got to the 58th floor ,it got stuck. I had a tingle in my stomach, feels good but strange to be stuck in a lift fitted with mirrors and a llady. I don’t know what the hell happened to this lift . I just turned to the mirror at my side as opposed to doing the obvious. In the mirror I saw a million reflections of myself and that lady. I suddenly felt like some one dug a large hole in my heart. My pulse was racing like a Ferrari in a Grand Prix. I just had caught a tinge of a image of someone whom I knew better than myself, someone who meant more than any word that could describe her, someone whom I never had seen or spoken to in the last 12 years. A millionth of a second is what it took for me to turn my head but the turn felt like a thousand years. I just gasped and saw her. She was as startled as I was. I just held on to myself. I kept an unassumingly calm composure. Over the years I have metamorphosised into being a very good actor. I can display the exact opposite emotion of how I really feel. Today was the test of the actor in me.
I was filled with a mixture of emotions. I asked her “Hi , How are you ?” She responded “ Hey Avinash ! How are you?”. We both had conveniently forgotten that we were stuck in a lift. She did much of the talking as I nodded, smiled, blushed and what not?.I just gazed at her. I knew her only through my dreams. In my dreamland her voice had remained as it would be of a 15 year old girl. She had stopped to grow in my dreams..Her voice had the sprinkle of a sprite. Like a Preface to her smile a dimple hiding in her cheeks would show up, then her hands would slide her hair behind her ears revealing those subtle little ear-rings. 'Twinkle in her eyes’ is an over used phrase but those words deserve her. The more I saw more beautiful she looked. She wasn’t a thunderbolt in the exact sense more like an evening drizzle. Only the connoisseurs’ could extrapolate the true essence of her beauty. My eyes were busy exploring her facial intricacies, never the less they acted well as if it weren’t gazing.

12 years earlier.
We both were studying in The Royal School in the suburbs of Bangalore. Navya and I were two inseparable creatures. We were the thickest of friends. She had a hell of a brain. She could think and do 12 different things all at once. I was the next best thing in that school and I could do half a thing at a time. I always believed that energy in the brain should be conserved and should not be used profusely. In my defense I can say that I was at least half as good as she was and had the potential to be like her. She would read all the books in the world, watch all the movies in the town ,play all the games that boys played. She would dance like a damsel and sing like an angel. She was the crowned princess of the school, and I was the geek who was always with her.
Things remained the same up until one day in the summer of 1996 she came running in the school corridor to meet me and said, “My father has got a job in U.S. and we are moving out in a week”. He had got a job in NASA. I was angry, I was angry at my country, I was angry at her father and at that new country to which she was going to move. I just held her shoulders very tight , their were tears in her eyes. I had an unbearable pain in my heart. Suddenly the world seemed so barren, the law of gravity no longer holding true. The whole world descended on me . I just had nowhere to go. She said “I feel very sad but I am helpless. I will still come back every now and then. After some years I would surely return and be here forever”. I just tried to convince her, to confuse her but nothing helped, the decision was made. She just kissed on my cheeks and went away. Saying ‘Good-bye’ isn’t exactly my forte.
Back to the Lift
Time had stopped for both of us. We sat down on the floor of the lift. We just re-acquainted ourselves with the current situation of our lifes.She stays in Houston, Texas and is happily married to a scientist working in NASA. She asked about my marital status. I answered “I got married to my new found love. She is the love of my life. Her name is Pooja, We both used to work together before. Currently she is back in India..Navya was happy to hear that.
It had been 1o minutes now and there was no sign of any help. Its only now that I took up my phone and made a few calls to get out of the lift. We both had remained oblivious to the fact that the lift was broke. In the meanwhile, I opened my laptop and showed her a poem that I had written after she went back. I said this was written then and belonged to her. She read that poem intently.
FIRST LOVE LASTS

When I saw u for the first time
my heart just stopped to rhyme
felt like some one sowed a seed
wanted to know what did it need

First time u gave that look
I was pushed to a nook
guessed it was just a crush
thoughts just seemed to rush

And the times u took my name
it didn’t sound all the same
Whilst u first held my hand
my pulse sunk like sand

you used to give me that smile
made me a prisoner of your jail
you laughed at my jokes
I blushed at your pokes
The thoughts we shared
and the colors we reared
said that we would be there
till the end of world stared.

But then TIME made us depart
All this ended before the start
The last time I saw you I knew
I will never again see you

I have never seen you since
become a fish sans fins
struggling to swim over you
drowned in this ocean of rue

Now your memories comes along in waves
And Leaves me cold in lonely caves
Now I see darkness even in sun
the moon also appears to burn

You've entered my veins so deep
all that I see is you in my sleep
you made my dreamland your home
I open my eyes to find myself alone

The Emptiness with which you have filled me
has left no room for others to be
I have made you grow inside
So that I can feel u r beside

You are my first love and my last
and it will last
even after the world is lost
----- U Wrote this.

I said “This was written a long time back and don’t know how much of it is true now. I am just showing this as this belongs to you. I am just shedding my baggage ha ha ”.
She understood what I meant. She was happy that I had moved on and did not remain a prisoner of past. She said” We both should be thankful to our lives and all the people around us that we have moved on with our lives. Whatever we share is too pleasant to label it with any predefined adjectives or nouns like love or friendship. A relationship that is wider than any friendship and deeper than any love. A pleasant memory, this is all that is and this is all that will be between the two of us”
I just could not agree more with what she said. As I have grown up, her image within me has metamorphosised from friendship to love to being this pleasant memory.But then you would ask me, why don’t you continue to be close to each other like some old friends. I beg to defer. “This is just how it is and that’s the way its going to be, between the two of us” and I kinda like it this way.
The lift door finally opened and we both happily bid adieu to each other and went our ways..

GURUPRASAD R
IBS SECTION F

The Jingle of a Jungle


An endless river kissing a seamless ocean?
A harmless moon eclipsing a mighty sun?
A floating island lost in a sea?
Aloof stands a leafless tree?

A smiling baby sitting alone?
A wounded soldier away from home?
A heart longing for the love of its life?
A messiah promising to end all strife?

Underneath present a labyrinth of facts
secrets hidden in these abstracts,
unraveling itself as time goes flying,
discovering the truths that were lying.

We change time or times change us or do they?
Miracles happen as often as u may
A bird swims and a fish flies
If no one cries, no one tries.

Everything under the sun is as simple as you want it to be.
Everything under the sun is as complex as you let it be.

- Guru